Podcast
The Jim Motavalli Interview Podcast
Hosted by WPKN, Jim Motavalli · EN
Jim Motavalli of WPKN features interviews new and archival - artists, movers, shakers, and more.
29episodes
Episodes
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Stevie Holland, Personalizing the Songbook
3w ago00:24:31Tap to summarizeStevie Holland is an American jazz vocalist, writer and lyricist who's played major concert halls, jazz clubs and cabaret rooms, in addition to performing in theater. The youngest of seven children, Stevie grew up in a music-filled, Norwegian-Italian household in Westchester County, New York. Her father was a tenor sax-playing commercial artist and avid jazz record collector, and her mother was a church soloist who performed in recitals and operas. Holland's most recent album is Talk to Your Tomatoes, released in late 2025. The album combines pop, jazz and Great American Songbook classics, as well as original songs. Arrangements are by Gary William Friedman, and if it sounds like Ben Monder on guitar, that's because it is. Also on the album are Matthew Sheens, piano; Matt Aranoff, bass; Jeff Davis, drums and Chet Doxas, alto saxophone. Mike Fahie plays trombone, and Sam Hoyt, trumpet and flugelhorn.
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Ocean Warrior David Helvarg Wants to Save Our Imperiled Kelp Forests
3w ago00:24:39Tap to summarizeDavid Helvarg, a longtime environmental activist and journalist, is the founder and president of the marine conservation group Blue Frontier Campaign. He is the author most recently of Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp (Island Press). In a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wondrous and underappreciated marine habitats.
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Dr. Kira Ganga-Keiffer on Religious Vaccine Resistance
3w ago00:23:05Tap to summarizeWhy do people cite religious objections to getting vaccinated? Where do these passionate beliefs, with no foundation in science, come from? Dr. Kira Ganga-Keiffer, a professor at Fairfield University, is a scholar of health and society, American religion, and history with a Ph.D. from Boston University). Her first book is Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America (Princeton University Press, May 2026).
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Gabriel Cohen on the Coming Tech Apocalypse
3w ago00:24:44Tap to summarizeAt this very moment, a tiny number of Silicon Valley leaders are making risky decisions that will have a huge impact on the rest of the eight billion people on this planet. They don't mean to cause harm, but their new creations often bring dire unintended consequences: destructive psychological, social, economic, and political results. We call these "side effects," but they're often more powerful than the intended ones. That's the premise of the new book, The Frankenstein Fix: Why Big Tech Goes Astray and What We Can Do About It. Cohen is a writing professor at Pratt Institute and the author of a plethora of crime novels. He was also a WPKN programmer in the 1980s!
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The Lives of a Cell: Roxanne Khamsi's New Book Spotlights Pioneering Research That Can Fight Cancer and Help Us Live Longer
May 1200:19:11Tap to summarizeRoxanne Khamsi talks to Jim Motavalli about the profound implications of recent cell research. She is an author, speaker and contributing writer for The Atlantic. Her first book, Beyond Inheritance (Riverhead Books, 2026), reveals how we mutate genetically every day of our lives and how the DNA changes that accumulate within us can profoundly affect our health. She has reported extensively on the intersection of genetics and medicine for more than two decades. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Popular Science, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Slate, Nature, New York magazine, WIRED magazine and National Geographic. She has appeared on television programs such as CBS News and has guest-hosted the national radio shows On The Media and Science Friday.
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Terri Thal: The Queen of Greenwich Village
May 700:27:39Tap to summarizeTerri Thal (third from right in the photo) was married to Dave Van Ronk (at far right), managed Bob Dylan (second from right) and was a friend of Dylan's then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo (second from left). She has written about that time in her book My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me. We talked about those times, about her close friend Patrick Sky (not as well remembered as Van Ronk) and about the politics of the era. Dylan said of Terri in his book Chronicles, "Van Ronk’s wife, Terri, definitely not a minor character, took care of Dave’s bookings, especially out of town, and she began trying to help me out. She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics — not so much the political issues but rather the highfalutin’ theological ideas behind political systems."
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John Sayles: The Filmmaker's Take on the World of Henry Ford
Apr 1800:31:55Tap to summarizeJohn Sayles is a prolific filmmaker who, since The Return of the Secaucus Seven in 1980, hasn't been afraid to take on big political themes. In 17 films and eight novels (as well as short-story collections and screenplays) he looks at a specific moment in the historical record from multiple perspectives. Sayles' latest work is Crucible, a closely observed historical novel that looks at the Ford Motor Company from the introduction of the Model A to the postwar period. It includes the fight for unionization (and union busters), the boss' anti-Semitism, the immigrants' experience, and Fordlandia, the ill-fated attempt to grow rubber (for tires) in Brazil.
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Robbie Fulks Talks About Life
Mar 2300:10:49Tap to summarizeRobbie Fulks is a native North Carolinian who has bluegrass and country as a default position, but also revels in many other musical styles. A stint at Columbia University in New York probably helped broaden his world view, but there's something of an auto didact about him, too. Music came naturally, as his father played guitar and his aunt banjo, which he started playing at age six. Skipping ahead, In 1987, he joined The Special Consensus Bluegrass Band, where he showcased his unique guitar flatpicking style. In the early 1990s he performed in the musical Woody Guthrie's American Song. Fulks writes some very funny songs that, as one critic noted, "subvert the country tropes," but his music also delves deep.
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The Country Blues of Ireland's Murieann Bradley
Mar 2300:15:37Tap to summarizeMurieann Bradley is a 19-year-old acoustic guitarist/singer from Ireland who specializes in the fingerpicking styles of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, citing influences such as Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, and Elizabeth Cotten. She learned to play largely from her father, a blues enthusiast. After a breakout performance on the BBC's Jools' Annual Hootenanny in 2023, she has toured the world, including a performance at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee on March 28. Her debut album, I Kept These Old Blues, was released on Tompkins Square Records and later reached the top ten of the UK Albums Download Chart. She signed with Decca Records in late 2024.
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Lab Dog: Melanie Kaplan's Book on Using Canines in Medical Research
Feb 1300:16:21Tap to summarizeMelanie D.G. Kaplan talks to Jim Motavalli about her book Lab Dog: A Beagle and his Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research. She explores the ethics and future of animal experimentation through the story of her rescued beagle, Hammy.
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